November 24, 2003

Bad? Is It The New Good, Or Vice Versa? Literary Life Is Complicated

Henry Farrell has an interesting post about Stephen King's acceptance speech at the National Book Awards. He apparently urged the audience (and judges) to consider more candidates like himself in future - to consider more popular books, in effect. Shirley Hazzard (never heard of her) gave him implicit what for with her acceptance speech. Henry says he is of two minds and, since Henry and I have uncannily convergent literary tastes, one of his must be mine. So I'll sort of more defend the other.

There is nothing more embarrassing than to attempt to hold the highbrow highground when one's lowbrow competitors are, in point of painful brutal objective fact, better artists than you have any hope of being in a million years. By contrast, to be a lowbrow who doesn't appreciate highbrow stuff that's better than you will ever be in a million years? That's why they invented the term 'highbrow'. Because of the million years it takes your brow to crawl up your neanderthal face, while you draw bison on the walls. I honestly don't know where we stand at present. I, like Henry, have a serious, semi-scholarly interest in fantastic fiction, which is King's genre. I have so much affection for Stephen King on account of countless pleasant hours spent reading his first, second, third, fourth and fifth rate fat novels. He's a novelist I feel was my friend in junior high. I feel his influence seep through other writers - Neil Gaiman, for example. Whose first, second, third, fourth and fifth rate products I greatly enjoy. It makes me smile to feel King's influence spread. When I hear he won a prize I feel like I heard a friend won a prize. It hardly occurs to me to ask whether he deserves it.

That said, there's something to be said for the view that the last writer in America who needs a leg up into the limelight is Stephen King. Of course, if the award were need based, it would be given to someone who hasn't even finished his novel yet, because it sucks and always will.

I just don't know the state of 'serious' non-'fantastic' American fiction at present, come to think of it. The only writer I read comprehensively - and so can judge - who falls in that category is Russell Banks. Cloudsplitter, Rule of the Bone and The Sweet Hereafter were heartbreakingly beautiful. And one is a movie, but I haven't seen it. And I've seen "Affliction" but never read it. Banks hardly qualifies as a hard-luck case in need of publicity. I have some other contemporary American writers on my shelf that, one thing and another, I haven't cracked the cover of. Could be they exhibit fine craft values and gravitas and sensitive awareness of great work previous greats have done. Could be they lack stupidity; maybe they refuse to publish crap. Maybe they've got that and it ought, by rights, to filter down to the likes of King so he never writes a clunker again. Maybe, on the other hand, red-blooded pulp practitioners like King are presently needed so that their lively examples may reinfuse the dessicated works of MFA grads whose slight, predictable, mannered sterile offerings are justly remaindered. (Sort of a Harlan Ellison "Dog and His Boy" theme, then.)

Probably I should read more contemporary highbrow stuff nobody much reads and give fantastic fiction a rest once in a while. This happens with movies. I think I only like the lowbrow stuff, after a long day thinkin'. Then the knife-fights bore me. Then when I watch a real critic's darling that poisoned the box offices for miles around so everyone had to move away - why, I find that the critics liked it because it was better made. Life is complicated; it's hard to know what to read.

UPDATE: I should make clear, before someone informs me, that the whole lowbrow/highbrow, serious/non-serious axis is, of course, deeply suspect. I'm just sort of jollying it along, you understand.

Comments

"I have so much affection for [Stephen] King on account of countless pleasant hours spent reading his first, second, third, fourth and fifth rate fat novels."

Since you're a literate and well-read guy, I'm curious John: which King novels do you regard as first rate, and second, and third, etc.? I haven't read any King in years, but back when I did (mostly in high school, some later on), I really wasn't that impressed with his novels (not even The Stand, which from what I can tell almost all his serious fans seem to consider his best), though he could certainly keep his plots cranking right along. What I loved were his short stories. Skeleton Crew, Different Seasons, Night Shift--I loved all those collections. King's short stuff was always, I felt, scarier, more fantastic, and truer than any of his big books. (My memory of "Grandma," "The Body," and "Survivor Type" still freak me out, 15-20 years on.)

Is this comment thread for discussing "speculative" fiction, or for discussing the merits of low/high- brow literature? W.r.t the first, I never read King, but I enjoyed Clive Barker very much (especially his short stories), and some of the comics in the DC/Vertigo series.

W.r.t the latter: maybe a better "axis" is the need for an axis containing the "good bad" category in describing books (Orwell's coinage): good literature has lasting value, bad literature should be tossed aside, either lightly or with great force, and "good bad" literature is what floats to the top of the pile of any given hack reviewer's pile on any given month. Most highbrow literature is quite as dreadful as most lowbrow literature; fortunately less of it gets published...

Went and corrected the whole Steven/Stephen thing. Now why did I make that silly mistake? I've actually written about King before on numerous occasions and gotten it right. Ah, well.

Russell, I think the only really truly first rate King is maybe "The Shining". I think then there's lots of really enjoyable second-tier stuff including the short stories you mention and a bunch of novels. ("Night Shift" is a better short story collection than "Skeleton Crew". "Different Seasons" is nice, too.) I would say, "The Dead Zone". I would also include "The Stand", but don't bother reading the extra long 1990 director's cut. Turns out there are reasons for editors.

"The Stand" is maybe not so good, but I think it's been tremendously influential - maybe more so than "The Shining" - and for good and bad. Future historians of fantastic fiction will regard this as a significant juncture. In general, King's 70's stuff seems to me to stand tall because he was inventing a genre; and in a way King - when he was younger - was more attuned to pop culture in a way that he was able to communicate effectively in his story-telling. These days I feel (and King himself has more or less admitted it) he's coasting. And his story-telling style and - frankly - personality have something inherently immature about them that haven't really allowed him to move on to more adult themes. This isn't as mean as it sounds. The man, as a writer, has all the advantages and disadvantages of a rock band. Good when very young ... then just what you would expect. I think this is a pretty good analogy, actually. It's not that the stuff King has produced in the 90's is clearly worse in a way you could quite put your finger on. But it really is like late Rolling Stones. It feels like someone has just gotten the hang of doing something that was originally only one step up from an adolescent outburst. And now it's not anything like an outburst anymore, so it's a bit suspect just because it's calculated, not fully felt. Actually, maybe Aerosmith is a better comparison than the Rolling Stones. First King wrote the literary equivalent of "Sweet Emotion"; now he's just rewriting "Janie's Got A Gun". A step down that wouldn't be noticable to some - probably for good reasons. But it makes a difference if you've got early Aerosmith on your list of guilty pleasures.

I'll just skip down the list to the fifth rate stuff. "The Dark Tower", "The Talisman". All his fantasy stuff, so far as I am aware, is unreadably bad.

I should say as well that I really haven't been reading King for about 10 years now. So my assessment could be out of date. But I doubt it.

"I would also include "The Stand", but don't bother reading the extra long 1990 director's cut."

I started that, but didn't get past the first section. He might have had good reasons for including what had been previously cut; I'm not an editor. But he made a terrible stylistic mistake in "updating" the book when he added back in all that had been cut before. References to Ronald Reagan, to the AIDS epidemic, and so forth just ruined the hysterical, paranoid, 1970s/hippy-trash/edge-of-the-Cold-War apocalyptic magnetism of the book. It still wasn't, I think, an especially great read, but I can remembering reading it at I don't know what age (14?) and just being swept up with the gassy, righteous anger of it all, at how THE MAN had finally DONE IT and KILLED US ALL. Good bloody delirious fun. It didn't work quite the same in a setting where, no matter how hard you tried to imagine it, you just knew that the Maoists were about 12 years out of place, and that no one called Jerry Garcia "Captain Tripps" anymore.

I don't remember "The Shining" too well; it's still those short stories which stick out most in my memory. I don't think I ever read "The Dead Zone." Is the Walker/Sheen adaptation any good?

Great analogy vis-a-vis Areosmith, by the way. King would probably approve.

Shirley Hazzard, it turns out, has just had published "The Great Fire", which is her first book in ages and is on lots of end-of-year lists (well, the Economist's anyway). From the reviews, she does sound pretty much like the anti Stephen King. I hope they didn't touch when they were on that stage.

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